Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit by Ian Michael Spurgeon (review)

In this book, Ian Michael Spurgeon provides a rich and tightly focused history of the American Civil War from the vantage point of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, the first black regiment raised in a northern state and the first to engage in military combat. Spurgeon aims to expand the sparse collection of scholarship on black soldiers in the Civil War and to provide a more robust picture of black Union soldiers than often found in popular history and film. In this, he succeeds, producing a meticulously researched history of the regiment that is impressive in detail and powerful in the story it tells. The level of detail, though, obfuscates the book’s larger historiographical intervention.

Spurgeon uses military records, pension records, letters and diaries, and other firsthand accounts of the war to convey the experience of the First Kansas Colored Infantry and other black soldiers who fought for their freedom in the Union army. The first four chapters trace the fraught origins of the infantry. Spurgeon offers the Kansas-Missouri border, characterized by violence and political warfare at the time, as context for understanding who the soldiers were and how they found their way to the Union army. Subsequent chapters begin with the telling of the regiment’s victory at Island Mound—a triumph that would have been forgotten had Col. James M. Williams, the regiment’s commander, not updated the War Department’s records after the war’s end. Spurgeon describes each engagement in great depth, and by the final chapter he has accounted for nearly all the regiment’s one thousand casualties. Like Colonel Williams in the postwar period, Spurgeon seeks to restore the honor of a black regiment remembered more for their dying than their fighting. He does so by highlighting not just the courage and skill they exhibited in battle, but also their influence on federal military policy and popular opinions of black soldiers.

The history of the First Kansas Colored Infantry beyond the battlefield is also compelling. Spurgeon supplements the infantry roster included in the appendix with qualitative narratives of the individual lives of soldiers and their families. These narratives evoke the fullness of Civil War–era African American life in the unique Great Plains context. Voices long buried in the archives resound in this book, making it an important contribution to scholarship on the role of black soldiers in the Civil War and the making of a new nation.